Carlos Zafón: The Angel's Game

I stretched out my arms towards the policeman and dug my fingers into his neck. Anchored by the weight of my body, the inspector was trapped and couldn’t move from the doorway. I pressed with all my might, pushing on his windpipe, squashing the arteries in his neck. He struggled to free himself from my grip with one hand while the other groped about for his gun. Finally his fingers found the trigger. The shot grazed my temple and hit the doorframe, but the bullet bounced back into the cabin and went clean through his hand. I sunk my nails further into his neck, feeling his skin yield. Grandes groaned. Using all the strength I had left, I managed to get more than half my body back inside the car. Once I was able to grab hold of the metal walls, I let go of Grandes and threw myself away from him.

I touched my chest and found the hole left by the inspector’s shot. I opened my coat and pulled out the copy of The Steps of Heaven. The bullet had pierced the front cover and the four hundred pages of the book, so that it peeped out, like the tip of a silver finger, through the back cover. Next to me, Grandes was writhing on the ground, grabbing at his neck with despair. His face was purple and the veins on his forehead and temples stood out like tensed cables. He looked at me, pleading. A cobweb of broken blood vessels spread across his eyes and I realised I had squashed his windpipe and that he was suffocating. I watched him as he lay shaking on the floor in agony. I pulled the white envelope from his pocket, opened it and counted fifteen thousand pesetas. The price of my life. I put the envelope in my pocket. Grandes was dragging himself across the floor towards the gun. I stood up and kicked it out of reach. He grabbed my ankle, begging for mercy.

‘Where’s Marlasca?’ I asked.

His throat emitted a dull moan. I fixed my eyes on his and realised that he was laughing. The cable car had already entered the tower of San Sebastián when I pushed him through the doorway and saw his body plunge eighty metres through a maze of rails, cables, cogwheels and steel bars that tore him to pieces as he fell.

The tower house was buried in darkness. I groped my way up the stone staircase until I reached the landing and found the front door ajar. I pushed it open and waited on the threshold, scanning the shadows that filled the long corridor. I took a few steps then stopped, not moving a muscle. I felt the wall until I found the light switch. I tried it four times but without success. The first door to the right, three metres away, led into the kitchen. I remembered that I kept an oil lamp in the larder and there I found it, among unopened coffee tins from the Can Gispert emporium. I put the lamp on the kitchen table and lit it. A faint amber light suffused the kitchen walls. I picked it up and stepped out into the corridor.

As I advanced, the flickering light held high, I expected to see something or someone emerge at any moment from one of the doors on either side. I knew I was not alone; I could smell it. A sour stench, of anger and hatred, floated in the air. I reached the end of the corridor and stopped in front of the last room. The lamp cast its soft glow over the wardrobe that had been pulled away from the wall and the clothes thrown on the floor – exactly as I had left them when Grandes had come to arrest me two nights ago. I continued towards the foot of the spiral staircase and warily mounted the stairs, peering behind my shoulder every two or three steps, until I reached the study. The ruby aura of twilight flooded in through the windows. I hurried across the room to the wall where the trunk stood and opened it. The folder with the boss’s manuscript had disappeared.

I crossed the room again, heading back to the stairs. As I walked past my desk I noticed that the keyboard of my old typewriter had been destroyed – as if someone had been punching it. Gingerly, I went down the steps, entered the corridor, and put my head round the entrance to the gallery. Even in the half-light I could see that all my books had been hurled onto the floor and the leather of the armchairs was in tatters. I turned round to examine the twenty metres of corridor that separated me from the front door. The light from the lamp only reached half that distance, beyond which the shadows rolled on like black water.

I remembered I’d left the door to the apartment open when I came in. Now it was closed. I walked on a couple of metres, but something stopped me as I passed the last room in the corridor. When I’d walked past it the first time I hadn’t noticed, because the door to that room opened to the left and I hadn’t looked in far enough to see. But now, as I drew closer, I saw it clearly. A white dove, its wings spread out like a cross, was nailed to the door. Drops of blood dripped down the wood. Fresh blood.

I entered the room. I looked behind the door, but there wasn’t anyone there. The wardrobe was still pulled to one side. The cold, damp air that emanated from the hole in the wall permeated the room. I left the lamp on the floor and placed my hands on the softened filler around the hole. I started to scratch with my nails and felt it crumble beneath my fingers. I looked around and found an old paperknife in a drawer of one of the small tables piled up in a corner. I dug the knife-edge into the filler. The plaster came away easily; it was only about three centimetres thick. On the other side I discovered wood.

A door.

I searched for the edges using the knife, and the shape of the door began to emerge. By then I’d already forgotten the close presence that was poisoning the house, lurking in the shadows. The door had no handle, just a lock that had rusted away from being covered by damp plaster for years. I plunged the paperknife into it and struggled in vain, then began to kick the lock until the filler that held it in place was slowly dislodged. I finished freeing it with the paperknife and, once it was loose, the door opened with a simple push.

A gust of putrid air burst from within, impregnating my clothes and my skin. I picked up the lamp and entered. The room was a rectangle about five or six metres deep. The walls were covered with pictures and inscriptions that looked as if they had been made with someone’s fingers. The lines were brownish and dark. Dried blood. The floor was covered with what at first I thought was dust, but when I lowered the lamp turned out to be the remains of small bones. Animal bones broken up into a layer of ash. Numerous objects hung from a piece of black string suspended from the ceiling. I recognised religious figures, images of saints, madonnas with their faces burned and their eyes pulled out, crucifixes knotted with barbed wire, and the remains of tin toys and dolls with glass eyes. The silhouette was at the far end, almost invisible.

A chair facing the corner. On the chair I saw a figure. It was dressed in black. A man. His hands were cuffed behind his back. Thick wire bound his arms and legs to the frame. An icy coldness took hold of me.

‘Salvador?’

I advanced slowly towards him. The figure did not move. I paused a step away and stretched out my hand. My fingers skimmed over the man’s hair and rested on his shoulder. I wanted to turn his body round, but felt something give way under my fingers. A second later I thought I heard a whisper and the corpse crumbled into dust that spilled through his clothes and the wire bonds, then rose in a dark cloud that remained suspended between the walls of the prison where for years this man’s body had remained hidden. I looked at the film of ash on my hands and brought them to my face, spreading the remains of Ricardo Salvador’s soul on my skin. When I opened my eyes I saw that Diego Marlasca, his jailer, was waiting in the doorway, with the boss’s manuscript in his hand and fire in his eyes.